Sunday, July 31, 2011

I've been working on a few projects over the past few weeks, including one that involves showing a multicultural mosaic of people seen from the back. These are details from that painting, still a work in progress. The tools I'm using are Corel Painter 11 and the Wacom Cintiq 21UX.

Even though I've written about this before on this blog, I have to say it again: I just love the way Painter lets you leave evidence of the "artist's hand." This is (ahem) hands-down one of my favourite things about Painter: the way you can see each stroke, and the way strokes interact in natural-looking ways without losing their individual qualities. You can also adjust each stroke so it has very specific properties before laying it down. In practice, this provides a lot of opportunities to DRAW within paintings... to distribute pigment using lines and also to create crumbly textures. In this image, there's a lot of brushwork using the Oils Smeary Round brush as well as some Sponge to get nice textured splotches... and I used dark blue to give the whole thing a bit of a woodcut feel.

I enjoy drawing or painting for articles/books that promote multiculturalism and tackle issues of identity. Here are some more drawings along these lines, done for the LRC (Literary Review of Canada).

My Website

My Drawn Portraits

My iPhone & iPad Sketches

My Urban Sketches

The Urban Sketchers Manifesto (from the USK blog)

1. We draw on location, indoors or out, capturing what we see from direct observation. 2. Our drawings tell the story of our surroundings, the places we live and where we travel. 3. Our drawings are a record of time and place. 4. We are truthful to the scenes we witness. 5. We use any kind of media and cherish our individual styles. 6. We support each other and draw together. 7. We share our drawings online. 8.We show the world, one drawing at a time.